Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy

AnthroPark (2012)

Mixed Media Installation

AnthroPark is an entertainment and educational facility dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and public appreciation of the Middle Anthropocene, the third epoch of the Quartenary Period, following the Holocene and Pleistocene, or the eighth epoch of the Cenozoic Era.

“For a time they calmly drink a cup of tea...”

The Anthropocene is a yet-to-be formalized term designating an epoch in which human impact is considered to be significant enough to constitute a new geological era for its lithosphere. For instance, chlorine from atomic weapons testing has been found in ice core samples, as have mercury traces from coal plants. The beginning of this epoch can be linked to the industrial revolution, after which it developed rapidly through the trinity of efficiency, consumption, and enjoyment, which together suggest a machinic modus operandi of the epoch.

Meanwhile, individuals in late capitalist society are estranged from social relationships as we respond to incessant injunctions to “Enjoy!”—we can say “no man is an island,” except in enjoyment. Such an injunction both distracts and distances human beings from each other, creating a network of islands that co-produce contemporary reality.  

But the island is an illusion. In our inexorable interconnection, each action on each island has both direct and indirect consequences; as such, each is implicated in producing or dissolving our veils of isolation. Through telemorphosis, all distances begin to collapse as separations entangle to form a twisted knot of the contemporary.[1] Progress and atrocity, excess and lack, even culture and nature begin to appear as merely two sides of the same coin of modernity. Just as inevitably, false dichotomies beget false projects for synthesis. Where lines are drawn, we reveal difference, perspective, and the multiplicity of realities.

“...All of a sudden, they’ll go apeshit and start to smash everything up because they can’t stand the boredom, the absence of incident.”

—The Primate Tea Party

AnthroPark is a theme park for line-drawing. The park form offers an immersive experience and moves seamlessly from utilitarian to symbolic moments, intensifying both corporeal and psychological perturbations. The AnthroPark experience is co-produced by a collection of by-products from Anthropocenic enjoyment, which, as they aggregate, become even more entangled in the participatory jouissance that reveals the tragicomedy of past and present enjoyments.

Like an institutional chimera, AnthroPark brings together a mosaic of disparate objects to form a specialized repository of attractions suited for an epoch of telemorphic implications. The dynamic forces of managed life are celebrated among the collection of interactive assemblages that provide curious visitors with an unusual, hands-on experience of the Anthropocene. 

In its original sense, the term “amusement park” referred to a garden open to the public for pleasure and recreation, often containing attractions beyond the plantings and landscape. Likewise, the particular form of the “menagerie,” a pleasure garden containing a collection of common and exotic animals, is housed in some architectural structure. These historical products can be read as precedents for the AnthroPark and its contemporary ambition to provoke both zoological and political responses to the Anthropocene.